The golden mouse is a small, climbing mouse of the Southeast, best known for the grapefruit-sized ball of leaves it weaves into vine tangles and canebrakes and uses as a nest. Louisiana holds 307 records of it from 2000 onward, but that map says as much about where biologists set traps as it does about where the mouse lives. Grant Parish alone accounts for 122 of those records, a pile-up that reflects focused small-mammal survey work in the Kisatchie country of central Louisiana rather than a true stronghold.
Reports come in every month of the year, and they crest hard in February, with a smaller rise in December. Part of that winter tilt is probably practical: after leaf fall, the leafy nests get easier to spot in bare tangles, and trappers and hunters are more active in the woods. Scattered records from East Baton Rouge, Washington, and the Feliciana parishes suggest the mouse also turns up in the wooded ravines of the Florida Parishes, not just the central uplands.
NatureServe currently lists the golden mouse’s Louisiana status as unrankable, meaning there isn’t enough survey data to assign it a firm state rank. That fits the pattern here: a mouse that’s probably widespread in tangled, vine-heavy woods, but lightly documented outside a handful of well-trapped parishes.
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